Science Cannot Prove That God Does Not Exist

In several posts, I have pointed out that it is impossible for science to prove that God exists, just as it is impossible to prove that God does not exist. The reason is that the object of scientific inquiry is the material world, and God is not part of that world and is therefore beyond the reach of science.

In a previous post, I criticized a book that attempted to do the former, from the perspective of believers. In this post, I will criticize another book that attempts to do the latter, from the atheist perspective. It is M-E: The God Within, by Joseph R. Abrahamson.

Although the author claims to rely on the principles of logic and the scientific method, he makes significant errors that indicate his lack of in-depth knowledge of these disciplines. The argument he presents as proof that God does not exist, although not explicitly stated in the book, can be deduced from reading it and can be summarized as follows:

Will the multiverse change the scientific method?

Antony Flew

These are my last comments on Man Ho Chan’s article, which reviews and refutes recent attempts to make multiverse theories scientific. Here I’ll deal with those attempts that propose renouncing the scientific method to make the theories of the multiverse scientific. This group of proposals, the most radical, can be summarized as follows:

• Epistemological anarchy: Proposed by Feyerabend in 1988, it argues that science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to foster progress than its law-and-order alternatives. In other words: We had better give up applying the scientific method, lest we miss some pseudoscientific theory that could have been useful. 

Man Ho Chan comments this: It is doubtful that multiverse theories can make any real scientific advancement. In some versions of multiverse theories, they suggest that all that can happen happens. In other words, these versions can explain everything. If a theory can explain everything, it does not lead to any scientific advancement… Therefore, it seems that multiverse theories are passively driven by empirical findings or theoretical constructions rather than actively leading to any new scientific advancement.

Responses to a reader who rejects Christianity

A loyal reader of my blog, who praises my way of popularizing science, rejects Christianity and seems bothered by the fact that my articles imply that I am a Catholic. In a series of comments that he wrote in one of my posts, he explains his arguments. I did not answer him there, because of the length of his comments, which in total contain 3,346 words, while my article only has 644 (more than five times less).

I think that this reader should be classified as an agnostic rather than an atheist, as it’s possible to deduce from the following words:

There is nothing stupid about rambling about the possible existence of God and deciding "I'm going 100% that he does exist." The universe is SO complex that, as long as there is no evidence to the contrary, believing that there may be someone/something that "designed" all this... cannot be dismissed as "stupid thinking."

I think the reader's various criticisms can be summarized by quoting the following words, which also appear in his first comment:

The problem comes when we try to use all these reasonings (which, in principle, speak of God as something completely ethereal and impersonal) to try to validate the story of Jesus Christ, which seems to be the goal.

Simple, right? The reader accepts my speaking about God, but not about Jesus Christ. Apparently, he deeply resents my doing so. I have named Jesus Christ in eight posts out of more than 450, although perhaps my Christianity is also clear in posts where I don’t name him. And he accuses me of trying to bring water to my mill (or sweeping home). This is a textbook case of the ad hominem fallacy. As we know, this fallacy (which in this case can be summarized as follows: you say this because you are Catholic) can be answered in the same way: you say that because you are an atheist, or agnostic, or whatever corresponds.

Most of the comments of the reader (2092 words) are directed against the possibility of miracles, and in particular against the miracle of Fatima, to which I have dedicated several posts in this blog. I suspect that the reader thinks that his arguments contradict what I said in those posts, but on the whole I think that he has just provided a confirmation. I said this:

1. Either the event really occurred, i.e., the witnesses told the truth.
2. Either the event did not take place, and the witnesses deliberately lied.
3. Or the event did not take place, but the witnesses did not lie, they were simply mistaken, or were the prey of a collective hallucination, or some equivalent explanation.

And I added:

Skeptics say that the miracle was a collective hallucination, or an optical effect due to the contemplation of the sun. Believers prefer the first option.

G.K.Chesterton

And what does the reader do? Assert that the only valid alternatives to my trilemma are the second and the third. In other words, what I had anticipated. An agnostic or an atheist must deny the possibility of miracles, therefore must necessarily adopt the other two alternatives. A believer has one more alternative, the first. (Catholics don’t automatically accept everything we are told is a miracle, as proved by G.K. Chesterton’s stories in the collection The Incredulity of Father Brown.) Then those 2000 or so words confirm what I had predicted.

There is also some reference to the other argument used usually by atheists to deny the existence of God: the problem of evil. In this regard he says:

If the planes that were going to hit the Twin Towers had frozen in the air 20 meters from the impact... it would have been amazing, there would have been no explanation of any kind and it would have been recorded on video... However, that did not happen... And thousands of people died. And many others suffered a mind-blowing psychological impact. It seems that miracles only happen to do inconsequential nonsense.

This is the problem of human evil, to which the usual response is to point out that we are trying to blame God for the evil that men do. Or as Mark Twain may have said: There are many scapegoats, but the most common is Providence. In this specific case, God is blamed for not having performed a miracle to prevent a barbaric human act. Others usually mention Auschwitz. This demand of miracles reveals a magical-mechanical concept of God, who would only be the automatic corrector of the evil done by human beings. Times don’t change much; that was also what they said to Christ crucified: Save yourself by coming down from the cross! (Mk. 15:30).

It’s curious: some time before the reader posted these comments in my blog, I had used similar arguments in a debate about the existence of God between two artificial intelligences in my latestscience fiction novel: Operation Viginti. The debate ends in a draw, which is what usually happens in this type of debate. Reaching an agreement is almost impossible, for both sides start from different axioms: one affirms that God exists, the other denies or questions it, so it’s difficult to find a convincing argument.

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Science, Faith and Atheism: Previous Next

 Manuel Alfonseca

The brain and consciousness

Canadian psychologist Barry Beyerstein published an article with the same title as this post, and an additional subheading that indicates that he is opposing extrasensory perception (ESP), telekinesis (TK) and other supposedly paranormal phenomena. However, he takes the opportunity to attack the existence of the human soul and the existence of God (although he never names God), and launchs a confession of faith in the identity of mind and brain (Psychoneural Identity, PNI); i.e., the monist theory, although he does not say whether he prefers the reductionist or the emergentist version of monism. In support of this, he offers the following arguments:

Is there life in the solar system beyond Earth?

At the end of 1981, Editorial Mezquita (a subsidiary of Editorial Alhambra) published my book entitled La Vida en Otros Mundos (Life in Other Worlds), one of whose chapters addressed the question in the title of this post. When the book was discontinued, it was again published in 1992 by MacGraw Hill of Spain, in an updated version, in a collection dedicated to science popularization, which kept my book in its catalog for around a decade. It is currently out of print.

Since then, things haven't changed much. Subsequent research has added a couple of satellites that weren’t considered in the 80s and the 90s to the list of bodies where it might be possible to find microscopic life. Of course, nobody expects to find intelligent life, or multicellular animals and plants, in any body in the solar system outside the Earth, although in science-fiction literature those things happen.

Abduction and the no-miracles argument

The Cheshire cat,
famous invisible cat

In an earlier post in this blog, I explained with an example the mode of reasoning based on abduction. Although not as strong as deduction and induction, abduction reaches high degrees of confidence in fields such as history, art criticism and others, less scientific than mathematics or natural science.

In another post published in March 2016, I described the fallacy of the invisible cat, which confuses a sufficient condition with a necessary condition for something to happen. This situation occurs when there are several possible causes that may have given rise to the same phenomenon.

In some cases, if we apply abduction to a situation where the fallacy of the invisible cat could occur, a conclusion can be reached. Think of the example I proposed to describe this fallacy:

The fallacy of life on Mars

Mars image mosaic from the Viking 1 orbiter

In a previous post I discussed the fallacy of the invisible cat, where the cause was the confusion between a sufficient and a necessary condition, as indicated by the following table:

Correct deduction: Necessary condition	Fallacious deduction: Sufficient condition
B is true only if A is true. B is true. Therefore A is true.	B is true if A is true. B is true. Therefore A is true.

There is another very similar fallacy, which also consists of confusing necessary and sufficient conditions, but in reverse. In this case, the right and wrong syllogisms are indicated by the following table:

Correct deduction: Sufficient condition	Fallacious deduction: Necessary condition
B is true if A is true. A is true. Therefore B is true.	B is true only if A is true. A is true. Therefore B is true.

Let us look at one example of this fallacy, applicable to the existence of life in Mars:

Water is necessary for the existence of life.

There is water on Mars.

Therefore there is life on Mars.

The fallacy of the invisible cat

Isaac Newton

In Chapter 1 of his book Astrology, science or belief? published in 1992, Manuel Toharia writes:

However wise they can be about certain subject matters, there is always some element that contradicts the myth of the perfect genius. For example, it is well-known that Newton was an angry man, terribly unfriendly and probably a repressed homosexual. Lest there be any misunderstanding, we must add immediately that what we find wrong with this alleged homosexuality of the English genius is its repression, which certainly made him a bitter person, no doubt with a minimal dose of self-esteem.

Probably a repressed homosexual? And how can we know this, if it is true that Newton repressed it? Or did Toharia (or whoever was his original source) have inside information, or perhaps he came to this conclusion because he knows that Newton suffered at least two psychic crises in his life, and believes that their cause must have been his repressed homosexuality? Observe the use of the qualifiers certainly and no doubt. If so, his argument would be a textbook example of the fallacy of the invisible cat:

About consciousness

Mirror Self-Recognition
(Steve Jurvetson, Menlo Park)

One of the most serious difficulties faced by materialists is the problem of consciousness, sometimes called self-awareness, the awareness I have of being myself rather than another person or object, the feeling of being the same individual from my first memory to my death, even though every few years all my atoms are changed, and hence the specific matter which makes up my body.

Since the materialist ideology assumes that only matter (in the broad sense) exists, it adopts a reductionist approach, according to which our self-consciousness must be, by definition, an epiphenomenon, the result of the joint action of our neurons. This is a dogmatic stance, without scientific support, as in the present state of our knowledge neuroscience has not the faintest idea about how self-consciousness is generated.

Logical fallacies

Stephen Hawking

In the previous article I mentioned that advocates of materialistic scientism often fall in logical fallacies, but usually do not notice, probably because their knowledge of philosophy is not deep enough. Moreover, they often despise philosophy, not realizing that logic (which is a part of philosophy) aims to analyze the way we think, and that, without logic, science loses its supporting base. So, Stephen Hawking wrote at the beginning of his book, The Grand Design:

Philosophy is dead ... Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

And starting there, he proceeds to make philosophy in a popular science book.

In my discussions with supporters of materialistic scientism, I’ve often had to tell my opponents that they are committing a logical fallacy. Generally they are reluctant to admit it, but when I explain it in detail, they finally do (I guess, because usually the discussion ends there). By this I do not mean to imply that I never fall in logical fallacies, because we are all human, but at least so far, no one has shown me any. Of course, it is possible that I have fallen in them and the person who was debating with me did not notice.

On intelligence

In his book On intelligence Jeff Hawkins writes this:

Francis Crick wrote a book about brains called The astonishing hypothesis. The astonishing hypothesis was simply that the mind is the creation of the cells in the brain. There is nothing else, no magic, no special sauce, only neurons and a dance of information... In calling this a hypothesis, Crick was being politically correct. That the cells in our brain create the mind is a fact, not a hypothesis. We need to understand what these thirty billion cells do and how they do it.

Wonderful! On the one hand, he states that it is a fact, not a hypothesis, that the neurons of the brain create the mind. On the other, he accepts that we don’t know what they do, or how they do it. How does Hawkins know this for a fact, not a hypothesis? By infused knowledge? How was he able to detect that fact? Are there any arguments to support it? He gives none, he just asserts. Is this good science?